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My Life as a Dog
Op-Ed Contributor – NY Times
My Life as a Dog
By JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Published: November 27, 2006
FOR the last 20 years, New York City parks without designated dog
runs have permitted dogs to be off-leash from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.
Because of recent complaints from the Juniper Park Civic Association
in Queens, the issue has been revisited. On Dec. 5, the Board of
Health will vote on the future of off-leash hours.
Retrievers in elevators, Pomeranians on No. 6 trains, bull mastiffs
crossing the Brooklyn Bridge ... it is easy to forget just how
strange it is that dogs live in New York in the first place. It is
about as unlikely a place for dogs as one could imagine, and yet 1.4
million of them are among us. Why do we keep them in our apartments
and houses, always at some expense and inconvenience? Is it even
possible, in a city, to provide a good life for a dog, and what is
a "good life?" Does the health board's vote matter in ways other than
the most obvious?
I adopted George (a Great Dane/Lab/pit/greyhound/ridgeback/whatever
mix — a k a Brooklyn shorthair) because I thought it would be fun. As
it turns out, she is a major pain an awful lot of the time.
She mounts guests, eats my son's toys (and occasionally tries to eat
my son), is obsessed with squirrels, lunges at skateboarders and
Hasids, has the savant-like ability to find her way between the
camera lens and subject of every photo taken in her vicinity, backs
her tush into the least interested person in the room, digs up the
freshly planted, scratches the newly bought, licks the about-to-be
served and occasionally relieves herself on the wrong side of the
front door. Her head is resting on my foot as I type this. I love her.
Our various struggles — to communicate, to recognize and accommodate
each other's desires, simply to coexist — force me to interact with
something, or rather someone, entirely "other." George can respond to
a handful of words, but our relationship takes place almost entirely
outside of language. She seems to have thoughts and emotions, desires
and fears. Sometimes I think I understand them; often I don't. She is
a mystery to me. And I must be one to her.
Of course our relationship is not always a struggle. My morning walk
with George is very often the highlight of my day — when I have my
best thoughts, when I most appreciate both nature and the city, and
in a deeper sense, life itself. Our hour together is a bit of
compensation for the burdens of civilization: business attire, e-
mail, money, etiquette, walls and artificial lighting. It is even a
kind of compensation for language. Why does watching a dog be a dog
fill one with happiness? And why does it make one feel, in the best
sense of the word, human?
It is children, very often, who want dogs. In a recent study, when
asked to name the 10 most important "individuals" in their lives, 7-
and 10-year-olds included two pets on average. In another study, 42
percent of 5-year-olds spontaneously mentioned their pets when
asked, "Whom do you turn to when you are feeling, sad, angry, happy
or wanting to share a secret?" Just about every children's book in my
local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet
away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes
recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating
illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?
In the course of our lives, we move from a warm and benevolent
relationship with animals (learning responsibility through caring for
our pets, stroking and confiding in them), to a cruel one (virtually
all animals raised for meat in this country are factory farmed — they
spend their lives in confinement, dosed with antibiotics and other
drugs).
How do you explain this? Is our kindness replaced with cruelty? I
don't think so. I think in part it's because the older we get, the
less exposure we have to animals. And nothing facilitates
indifference or forgetfulness so much as distance. In this sense,
dogs and cats have been very lucky: they are the only animals we are
intimately exposed to daily.
Folk parental wisdom and behavioral studies alike generally view the
relationships children have with companion animals as beneficial. But
one does not have to be a child to learn from a pet. It is precisely
my frustrations with George, and the inconveniences she creates, that
reinforce in me how much compromise is necessary to share space with
other beings.
The practical arguments against off-leash hours are easily refuted.
One doesn't have to be an animal scientist to know that the more a
dog is able to exercise its "dogness"— to run and play, to socialize
with other dogs — the happier it will be. Happy dogs, like happy
people, tend not to be aggressive. In the years that dogs have been
allowed to run free in city parks, dog bites have decreased 90
percent. But there is another argument that is not so easy to respond
to: some people just don't want to be inconvenienced by dogs. Giving
dogs space necessarily takes away space from humans.
We have been having this latter debate, in different forms, for ages.
Again and again we are confronted with the reality — some might say
the problem — of sharing our space with other living things, be they
dogs, trees, fish or penguins. Dogs in the park are a present example
of something that is often too abstracted or far away to gain our
consideration.
The very existence of parks is a response to this debate: earlier New
Yorkers had the foresight to recognize that if we did not carve out
places for nature in our cities, there would be no nature. It was
recently estimated that Central Park's real estate would be worth
more than $500 billion. Which is to say we are half a trillion
dollars inconvenienced by trees and grass. But we do not think of it
as an inconvenience. We think of it as balance.
Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we
are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party
at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.
There has never been less clean air or water, fewer fish or mature
trees. If we are not simply ignoring the situation, we keep hoping
for (and expecting) a technological solution that will erase our
destruction, while allowing us to continue to live without
compromise. Maybe zoos will be an adequate replacement for wild
animals in natural habitats. Maybe we will be able to recreate the
Amazon somewhere else. Maybe one day we will be able to genetically
engineer dogs that do not wish to run free. Maybe. But will those
futures make us feel, in the best sense of the word, human?
I have been taking George to Prospect Park twice a day for more than
three years, but her running is still a revelation to me.
Effortlessly, joyfully, she runs quite a bit faster than the fastest
human on the planet. And faster, I've come to realize, than the other
dogs in the park. George might well be the fastest land animal in
Brooklyn. Once or twice every morning, for no obvious reason, she'll
tear into a full sprint. Other dog owners can't help but watch her.
Every now and then someone will cheer her on. It is something to
behold.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author, most recently, of "Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close."
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